/prog/rider's secret society

We should create a club/lodge for programmers. If stonemasons created one many years ago just because they knew how to carve stupid stones and build some basic structures, why we still don't have one?
This is what we need:
◦ A symbol.
◦ A secret handshake.
◦ A set of rules.
◦ An unknown leader.
◦ An unknown sub-leader.
◦ A library with exceptional computer books, a printed version of world4ch's /prog/ (aka The Old Testament), ancient computers, and other relics.
◦ A list of heretic languages carved in stone.

>>51

With procedures being associated with the file at the operating system level, the basic operations associated with the file are handled by the operating system. Whereas if the file is only seen as a sequences of bytes by the operating system, the basic operations associated with the file are pushed into the application level. I can see an efficiency gain if the operating system hosts the services. Each application needs to load a library in order to operate on a file. If two applications are using the same file, they can't be aware that they are using the same information and share it. But if this was done at the operating system level, it could see that two processes requested the same service of the same file, so they could both read from the same cache.

If an image viewer and a printing application were to both request the raster scan interface of a jpeg file, the operating system could load the data of the file from however it is stored, decode the image into a region of memory, and provide this region of memory read only to both processes. The computer decodes the image once. If this was done at the application level, the printing application and the image viewer would both load the same jpeg library, both decode the image so they each have their own raster representation of it, and then they can both use their own copy. The image is loaded twice using the unix way.

If you wanted to shoe horn this feature into unix, the usual was is to create a daemon that sits and waits for processes to request certain operations on some file. The daemon loads the file and provides an interface or some result to the querying process.